Three Oaths - Viewpoint of The Rishonim - Nachmanides

Nachmanides

Ramban did not explicitly discuss the Three Oaths, however he did maintain that it is incumbent upon Jews in every generation as a positive commandment to attempt to conquer the Land of Israel. In his glosses (Hashmatot) to Rambam's Sefer HaMitzvot on Positive Commandment #4 he wrote:

That we are commanded to take possession of the Land which the Almighty, Blessed Be He, gave to our forefathers, to Avraham, to Yitzchak, and to Yaakov; and not to abandon it to other nations, or to leave it desolate, as He said to them, You shall dispossess the inhabitants of the Land and dwell in it, for I have given the Land to you to possess it, (Numbers, 33:53) and he said, further, To Inherit the Land which I swore to your forefathers, (to give them,) behold, we are commanded with the conquest of the land in every generation.

Nachmanides' position here is untenable if he maintains that the Three Oaths are Halachically binding. Accordingly it would appear that Nachmanides implicitly rejects the Three Oaths as Halachically binding, and that to treat it as such would be to effectively nullify a biblical commandment.

The anti-Zionist response to this is that Nachmanides' words "we are commanded with the conquest of the land in every generation" mean every generation until the era of exile. One of the established rules for counting the 613 commandments in the Torah is that we do not count one-time-only commandments, such as God's command to count the Jews in Numbers 1:2. Nachmanides' intent here is to prove that conquering the land was not a one-time-only commandment that applied to Joshua's battles; rather it applied to King David and, by extension, in every generation. This justifies counting it among the 613, even if it does not apply during exile, just as numerous commandments associated with the Temple are counted despite the fact that they cannot be kept during exile. Nachmanides does say explicitly later in the piece that the commandment to live in the Land applies even during exile, but this means strictly living there as an individual - not conquering, since that would conflict with the Three Oaths.

It has also been proposed that Nachmanides' intent was that even the commandment that a Jew should live in the land as an individual during exile applies only when living in the land is consistent with exile, that is, when a non-Jewish government rules the land. But living under a Jewish government such as the State of Israel might itself constitute a violation of the oath. Nachmanides felt no need to mention this exception to the commandment because he did not foresee the rise of a Jewish government in the Holy Land before the messiah.

Of note is that Rashbash who was himself a descendant of Nachmanides, understood this particular biblical obligation to be binding on the individual level but not on the collective:

In truth, this commandment is not a commandment which includes the entirety of Israel in the Exile which now exists, but it is a general principle as our Sages stated in the Talmud in Ketubot, that it stems from the Oaths which The Holy One, Blessed be He, made Israel swear not to rush the End, and not to ascend like a wall.

Rabbi Chaim Zimmerman in his book, Torah and Existence explains his solution to the contradiction between Nachmanides's position and the Three Oaths. First, he makes a distinction between settling the land and conquering the land. The commandment is realized by settling the land, and conquering is merely a preparation for the core obligation of settlement. The obligation to settle the land does not necessarily violate the Three Oaths. Rabbi Zimmerman adds that the Three Oaths only apply to invading the land by force. He writes:

...the difficulty in the Ramban which says that the mitzva of kibush prevails in our time against the oath, dissolves. The oath, shelo yaalu bechoma means explicitly that we cannot storm eretz-Yisrael from chutz-laaretz. But when the Jews are in eretz-Yisrael, there is surely a hechsher mitzva of kibbush-haaretz.. How can the Jews be in eretz-Yisrael without the aliyah "bechoma?" The answer is very simple. If many Jews came to eretz-Yisrael individually, or by permission of the nations, then once they are there, there is a command of kibbush... There was never an oath upon the people who were in eretz-Yisrael.